> If it means what I think it means, how do we solve this issue without looking at it purely through skin tone and fomenting division?

Assuming I understand the question correctly: increased representation within industries lowers social pressure and means people from the dominant culture need to spend less time self-policing, because the less of a monopoly that the dominant culture has over representation, the less that it needs to worry about that representation being perfect.

There's a subtle phenomenon that I don't always communicate well, but I try to get across to people often: the tone and nature of conversations around representation varies so much when you're inside of a community vs outside of it. When people are fighting for their equality, the stakes of everything just shoots up. And for communities where there isn't a lot of representation, I often see conflicts even within those communities become a lot more tense and a lot more fraught than I think they otherwise would be.

So for example, the way that I see LGBTQ+ people talk about LGBTQ+ issues inside of LGBTQ+ communities is often much more open ended and much more experimental than the way that I see LGBTQ+ people talk about issues outside of LGBTQ+ communities. My feeling is that one of the big reasons for that is that inside of the community those people aren't as worried about being shouted down or having discussions used against them in the future to deny their rights.

What does this mean for "nothing about us without us"? Well, I'm not an expert on this stuff and I don't want to oversimplify it, but in my opinion, a big part of that movement (regardless of which minority group we're talking about) is that people want agency to describe themselves and agency to present themselves in popular media, and they want a degree of agency over how people learn about issues affecting their community. How racial minorities are represented in media is a lot more complicated and a lot more fraught when it's mostly just white people writing that representation -- not because it's a problem for white people to write about minorities, but because it means that the primary form of representation is by people outside of those communities.

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Another subtle idea that's kind of complicated to explain but that I think is important: in my opinion, minority groups often don't want to be protected by majority groups, they want agency and power to protect themselves, and more than that, they don't want to need to be protected. And there's a really big difference between advocacy that primarily takes the form of majority groups promising to use their power responsibly, and advocacy that take the form of dismantling a power structure entirely. There's a difference between advocacy that says that minority groups are always going to be at a disadvantage but we'll accommodate them or protect them from threats, and advocacy that removes the threats.

So going back to the question of representation, even the most well intentioned white person can't really be responsible for handling all representation of a minority group they're not a part of, not because they're necessarily evil or bad, but because that's just really heckin hard to do, and nobody has the expertise to do that. It's asking too much. And it's putting that white person in a position where they are attempting to use their power responsibly to represent the minority community rather than getting rid of the need to have a majority-group writer advocate for them in the first place.

An understated consequence of these power structures is that they make it hard even for white people to navigate these conversations; the monopolization of media and the under-representation from people who are intimately familiar with those communities makes everything higher stakes. It means that the limited representation that does exist has to be really good and apply to everyone, because there aren't as many alternatives. It means that representation from people who aren't in those communities becomes more problematic, because that's now the primary way that people outside of the community are going to see it.

I really do honestly believe that as communities feel less threatened about how representation might be used against them, and as communities feel like they have more legitimate power over their own representation, and as they feel that they're not only able to rely on a few sources to communicate about themselves, and that they start to feel like there's not a limited quota of representation where someone outside the community tackling a subject means there's suddenly less funding or availability for them give their own perspective -- I think that has an effect of lowering the stakes of conversations and of increasing the ability of people to extend grace to imperfect representation or to representation that comes outside of those minority communities.

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So I guess the TLDR there is that redistributing power over representation and getting more community members involved industry-wide in representation of their communities has a positive side effect for majority communities of decreasing the pressure on them to be perfect. You can think of it as redistributing power, but you can also kind of think of it as redistributing responsibility.

Again with a programming analogy -- this is super-forced and not really the same, and there are lots of problems, but there are also sort of similar principles at play if you squint: when I distribute FOSS software, one of the advantages to me of allowing forking is that I don't have the same level of pressure to force my software to perfectly align with everyone's goals. If there's only one piece of software for an entire field, that piece of software is the only choice people have, and the stakes are much higher in the debate over what that software has to be able to do. In a field where there is a large diversity of software to solve a problem, and (even better) if the people who have that problem feel like there are software solutions even being built directly by them -- in that world, nobody is going to care if my specific piece of software isn't perfect.

But getting to that point where there is a lot of diversity and freedom within the software field and people have other options that they can go to instead of me -- that means me giving up a level of monopolization and control over that field, and sometimes even requires special effort to make building software within that field more accessible to members of that community (ie, making a program scriptable, releasing libraries, maybe even helping foster alternative efforts, etc...). But if a company is a gatekeeper over an entire field, more pressure is put on them to perfectly serve that field.

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There are other aspects of "nothing about us without us" that I'm not touching on, and I don't speak for everyone, but in my personal opinion based on what I know and what I've seen, I think the above is a big part of that phrase, and I think that increasing resources for and stories specifically by members of minority communities has a way of defusing high-risk conversations about representation and allows for a lot more grace.