As a writer should race be a factor in what your work is about?

Maybe this question came into my head since I have been reading Langston Hughes’s essays recently. He was a firm believer in writing what you know. Now, I know that he is not the first to say this but he definitely is one of the first to live by that rule. Race is always a uncomfortable subject, especially when you are dealing with one race being oppressed. Yes, we have come a looong way from those days when life was harder for certain races than it was for others, but there are still some issues that need to be addressed. For the sake of not making any of my followers feel uncomfortable, I will try and just stick to my personal struggles and ideas. As a young aspiring writer I have plenty of ideas for my stories and characters. Whenever I start a story there is always the question of whether or not my main character should be African American simply because I am. Of course I am aware that I have to branch out and not have all my characters resemble me in race. But sometimes I wonder why I should have to feel guilty about making my protagonist African American? Would it make my story any less engaging? Maybe I am scared my writing wouldn’t be taken seriously. But is that my fault? I am scared that if I have a story centered around a black character it might be deemed unbelievable simply because I refuse to submit my work to fit certain stereotypes. None of my characters will speak in slang or be typically “ghetto”. I refuse to do this because I know plenty of black people who are nowhere near what rap songs, and demeaning books and movies depict us to be. Why should I depict my characters as something that I am not even surrounded by? I feel that the large number of African American books depicting ALL their African American characters as such should be reprimanded. Yes, there are black people who speak and act a certain way. Who have come across drugs and prostitution, and maybe aren’t as cultured as others. But trust me, that percentage of them aren’t as high as society would like you to believe. There is nothing wrong with having those characters written about, as long as they are portrayed in a fair and unbiased way. They are making it that much harder for other writers who want to introduce a different type of black character to the world. One who is equally as realistic. I look at novels by Toni Morrison, novels that center around slaves who are illiterate, but there is a story behind it and the book itself isn’t affected by it. Its time that African American writers start speaking for us all and show readers that we are more three dimensional than history has shown.