'Old white guys like me need to shut up and listen': Kevin Bacon shows support for Black Lives Matter movement

‘The older I’ve gotten, the more I realise how much there is still to learn,’ actor said

Actor Kevin Bacon is using lockdown to examine his own white privilege in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests taking place across America.

Appearing on The Tonight Show, the Footloose star told host Jimmy Fallon that the George Floyd protests across the world had shown him the importance of listening to other people.

"It's incredible to experience this and to go through this historically, not just the Covid-19, but clearly seeing the protests and what's going on," Bacon, 61, said.

“For an old guy like me, I was born in 1958, and to witness the passion of the young people across the world for social justice, it leaves me speechless, which is probably a good idea because I think it's a good time for old white guys like me to just shut up and listen. Speechless is probably a good choice.”

Having taken the time to understand that he didn’t “have a full understanding of the life experience of people that are different than me”, the actor explained: “I’m one of these people [who] when I was a kid, I thought I knew everything ... about acting, everything about music, everything about politics, everything about people.

“I thought I could always understand what it was like to be other people, had a lot of compassion and basically I thought I just knew it all. The older I’ve gotten, the more I realise how much there is still to learn. So this has been a perfect example of a good time for me to stop and learn and listen and read and just try to gain some kind of deeper understanding.”

Pausing, Bacon continued: “Here’s the thing, I’ll never understand it because when I walk out of the house, I’m white. To not have that experience and privilege is something that I want to educate myself on.”

Black Lives Matter demonstrations continued in the US and across the world this weekend, with protesters calling for change to racist systems following the death of Floyd, who died in May after a police officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes.