A black man took a now-viral selfie with a white cop after getting pulled over for speeding, posted it to Facebook urging people to support the police and quit race baiting.
Greg Barnes Jr. was speeding home from work in Munice, Indiana, when an unidentified white state police trooper pulled him over. In light of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the prolific number of recent attacks on police officers, Barnes felt obligated to use the experience as a platform to tell the public via social media that the color of his skin had nothing to do with getting pulled over, according to Fox10 News.
“I can’t stress enough that NO demographic and/or profession of people are all bad. Neither of us are the enemy,” Barnes wrote in his Facebook post. “We can continue to fight against each other until we are literally ‘black and blue’, or we can show one another the respect we inherently deserve, not as ‘black man’ and ‘blue police officer’, but as humans. None greater, none less.”
According to campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter, non-white people are constantly subjected to unfair discrimination. To counter that claim, Barnes posted on Facebook on Sept. 18 that most police officers are just doing their jobs and race rarely ever plays a role.
“He was doing his job, and I had made a mistake in trying to hurry home to get started moving that led to our paths crossing,” the post read. (RELATED: Former Inmate Prays For The Safety Of Officer Who Arrested Him)
Barnes, who works as a senior retail officer at Star Financial Bank according to his Facebook page, urged people to just treat others with respect — no matter their color. During the ordeal of getting pulled over, the retail officer said he and the cop were exceedingly respectful to one another, which led to them chitchatting about their day.
“He ran my information, and in the end we talked more about how are individual days were going, and the situations and circumstances within our society that have led to interactions such as he and I’s to play out much more negatively, some even deadly, then we talked about the situation that led to him pulling me over,” Barnes wrote on Facebook. “In the end we both thanked each other for our mutual displays of respect and agreed to take a ‘selfie’ together to help tell our story.”
The Facebook post is now viral with over 300,000 shares.