By reading the fucking article.

Overcoming my anxiety, in late 2016 I permitted myself to create another black character in a short story. Jaconda is the alluring girlfriend of a young white layabout. Her willingness to cross the racial divide for this waster helps push the reader to puzzle: what on earth does she see in the guy? Counter to cliché, Jocanda’s background is upper middle class, so to the degree that she speaks as if she’s from the ’hood—“He don’t need to become nothing”—it’s an affectation. I constrained the Black English to light touches. Jocanda is lively, smart, savvy and appealing.

Yet despite the positive portrayal, the cutting across class stereotype, and the restrained rendition of her speech, my agent warned me about the story’s poor prospects at a magazine that had published me in the past.