Yeah of course!
Growing up in the Bay Area I was surrounded with lots of different people, so I often find myself paying homage to the people I remember from my past. And this has stuck with me through to adulthood. So in any situation where there might be people of different backgrounds, like a modern-day city setting, why not include more people of color?
I also try to draw these characters, particularly background figures (where I can go as wild as I like) as true to real life as I can and I'll regularly search my memory banks for people I notice just going around my weekly routines. I think these pages sum that up pretty well.
Even for historical fiction I do research to see what kind of people were around in certain areas in particular time periods. For example I'm formulating a short story concept set in the German Black Forest sometime in the late 1700's. I thought it would be neat to have the main characters be Turkish since I was aware there are a lot of Turkish immigrants in Germany. I dug around a little and found they've been in ready contact with Prussia/Germany since the 1500's and more facts that can support my two characters being there.
I have another historical fiction about two cowboys in the American West in the 1870's, one's Black and the other is mixed Spanish and Mescalero Apache.
Diversity doesn't have to be forced if there are facts to support it. Overall you just have to write well-rounded, thought-out characters. I don't know why in like Star Wars for example people say it has forced diversity, it just has bland characters that happen to be poc.