To my way of thinking, if people of color are only present in a story when the story calls for them, then there's gonna be an awful lot of white characters and not many of color without anybody being consciously racist about it, and it's one more symptom of people of color being Them, not part of Us. Therefore my original stories always call for characters of color unless there's a real good reason for them not to. I'm sure I'll fuck this up, and you're right that tokenism and quotas are a way to fuck this up. But at least I will fuck up in a way that's out of step with the usual way to fuck up about race in stories, you know?

Similarly, without a real good reason not to, all my stories will have a cast that's at least half female. I want all my stories to have good representation of gender and sexual minorities and people with disabilities, too, and the reason I am not standing firm on those points the way I am on female characters and characters of color (whatever that reason is, 'cause I'm not sure I know) probably reflects poorly on me.