Racism: does it ripen with age?

My grandpa who I don't get to see very often visited from out of town this weekend, yet there were noticeable things he would say that caught my attention as being very racist. It shocked me at first because I feel like around people my age and my parents age you would never hear something so racially bias come out of someone's mouth because it is not socially acceptable and frowned upon. As we were sitting down to dinner and one of my brothers was talking about fried chicken, my grandpa announced, "Black people make the best fried chicken." I was extremely shocked because he said it in such a casual way and to me it was clearly racist, but he did not seem to notice, to him it was a normal topic of conversation.

The question came to mind, is this common in his generation? But in reality none of my other grandparents say something that blunt, however I have noticed some much subtler things that suggest to me that they may have some similarly racist thoughts. I looked into it to see if there was any actual research to back up my hypothesis that my grandpa's generation is naturally more racist than ours. I found that just 2 months ago, Oprah Winfrey did an interview with Will Gompertz on the very subject of racism today. Oprah would agree with my hypothesis but she takes it to a whole new level that I would not entirely agree with when she proclaims, "There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die." Oprah is saying that the older generations were more exposed to racism when they grew up and by saying "they just have to die," she claims that when this generation is past this racism will vanish. 

Although I do think that the older generations, like my grandma grew up in a world where they were exposed to more racial hatred, so it would make sense that they may hold some of those views into adulthood, I do not believe that simply that generation is the problem. In our generation today there are plenty of racial jokes, for example this entire website is devoted to racial jokes, and I can assure you that the grandpa's of this generation are not the ones creating this website. We have also explored as a class the subtle racism in media today through TV Tokenism. This is not a problem we can simply scapegoat onto one generation or another, it is something we all have to face in America together.