After The Beachcomber came out last Wednesday, Milt Williams — who hadn’t yet read the paper — noticed he was getting concerned looks.

At the grocery store, acquaintances asked him if he was OK. Others probed a bit more deeply. Finally a good friend said, “Hey, were you the black guy who got arrested Friday night?”

Williams is African-American. He jokes that he’s one of four black men on the Island, though it’s hard to know for sure, he says, adding with a smile: “We all look the same.”

He doesn’t mean that, of course. It’s just been his experience here, ever since someone stopped him at Mom’s Deli 16 years ago and asked him if he were the Class 3 rapist who had recently moved to Vashon — a man of a different height, weight and age who also happened to be African-American.

“No ma’am,” he recalled telling her. “I run the after-school program for the YMCA.”

Williams, a former military police officer, has lived on Vashon 20 years. He raised his two sons here. He now wonders — as do others — why The Beachcomber noted the race of the man who was arrested Friday night after he refused to leave the Sportsman’s Inn.

Williams, at our invitation, stopped by The Beachcomber. We had a warm visit, punctuated by a lot of laugher. He’s a lively, funny, animated man, and the conversation couldn’t have been friendlier.

Still, Williams raised a good point — one we’ve been reflecting on ever since a few others asked us that question, too. Why did we note the race of the man who was arrested?

We believe we have a solid answer to that question, one that complies with what we believe to be a well-considered journalistic practice: We did so because we believed his race was central to the story.

Based on what eyewitnesses told us and our own knowledge of life on Vashon (and life in America), we believed that the two women who intervened in front of Sporty’s did so because they saw two white deputies leading a black man out of a bar in cuffs. They intervened, we believe, because they wanted to bear witness — just in case.

It’s a sadly current issue these days. Indeed, it’s one that the Seattle Police Department is currently grappling with in the wake of a videotape that captured a couple of officers beating up a Latino man and calling him racist epithets.

When we explained our thinking on this score to readers, however, some probed further: If we thought race was central to the story, why did we note the color of one person — the man being arrested at Sporty’s — but not that of everyone else? By doing so, they said, we were putting forward a racist belief system — an assumption that white is the baseline color, as it were, and that to be another color is to be “other” in our society.

Our answer to that is a mea culpa. Yes, we made that mistake. We believe our failure on this score is softened by the fact that we ran a photograph of the incident — clearly revealing the color of the two officers.

Still, as one reader told us, words are powerful. Had we thought this one through, had we taken a few more breaths on what was a very long, pressure-cooker of a day, we likely would have reached a similar conclusion and noted the races of all involved. We’re sorry we didn’t do that.

Finally, Williams had yet another question: Why didn’t we name the Sporty’s suspect? We named the woman who was arrested for assaulting an officer. Why not him? It certainly would have made it easier for Williams to go shopping at the grocery store last week.

Our thinking on that is a little more complex. We normally don’t name people who have been arrested but not charged with a crime. We named Jessica DeWire, the woman arrested that night, because e-mails were flying across Vashon all weekend, e-mails that named her and that thus put her squarely into the public spotlight. It was a high-profile incident involving a well-known Vashon woman. The cat, it seemed to us, was already out of the bag.

As for the man, however, it felt like a different story: Getting escorted out of Sporty’s for intoxication would rarely lead to one’s name being in the paper, least of all on the front page. When we chose not to name him, we weren’t thinking of the other African-American men on Vashon. We weren’t thinking of Milt Williams. We were thinking about the Sporty’s suspect. And it didn’t seem fair.

It was tough for us to hear some of these criticisms last week. We worked exceedingly hard on this story, and we did so in an effort to do what we think is the highest calling of our profession — to ferret out the truth. Unlike the rest of the media in the region, we didn’t just go with a news release issued by the King County Sheriff’s Office. We found eyewitnesses who enabled us to tell a much more complex and nuanced story, one that suggested — as we noted last week — that a King County Sheriff’s deputy may have crossed a line.

Still, we know that hard work is not enough. And while we feel enormous pride in our product, we know, too, that newspapers are an inherently flawed medium — the rough draft of history, produced on the fly.

Last week, as Williams left our office, he said he’d gladly act as our diversity consultant anytime we might need one. We may very well take him up on that offer, especially if we ever again confront an issue as fraught as the one in front of Sporty’s last week.

— Leslie Brown is The Beachcomber’s editor.