Mentissa won The Voice Kids. Racism tried to rewrite the victory

A talent-show victory is supposed to be the cleanest story television can tell: a gifted young performer sings, the audience applauds, and the trophy settles the argument. Mentissa’s experience shows how quickly that fantasy collapses when some viewers decide that the winner does not look like the person they expected to see.

In 2014, at 14, Mentissa won the first season of The Voice Kids Vlaanderen in Belgium. The celebration was followed by racist messages and attacks on her singing. In recent interviews, she has described how the abuse made her regret winning, withdraw from music and refuse media requests for at least a year. Voici reports that she remembered viewers saying they wanted “a little white girl” to win and citing the racist comment, “This isn’t The Voice Africa here.”

Years later, Mentissa returned to the format in France’s tenth season of The Voice in 2021, joining Vianney’s team and reaching the final. Her story is now circulating again because it is not merely a tale of resilience. It is an indictment of the audience culture surrounding televised talent competitions.

The trophy was never the problem; the audience’s imagined winner was

Talent competitions sell the idea that performance is the great equalizer. Hit the note, move the room, earn the vote. But that promise has always had a flaw: audiences do not judge only what they hear. They also bring assumptions about who looks credible, familiar or “appropriate” as a winner.

Mentissa’s own explanation is devastatingly simple. The show’s first edition in Flanders, she said, came with viewers who wanted a white girl to win. That framing matters because it reveals the prejudice beneath the supposedly neutral language of taste. The criticism was not just “I prefer another singer.” It attached legitimacy to race, then used musical judgment as cover.

That is why the racist comments about her voice deserve attention rather than being treated as a secondary detail. Bigotry rarely announces itself as a coherent argument. It often arrives disguised as taste, standards or skepticism. A contestant’s vocal choices become “the real issue,” while the hostility aimed at their skin color is treated as background noise. In Mentissa’s case, the two were intertwined from the start.

The result is a particularly cruel kind of invalidation: the winner is told that the victory itself is evidence of a mistake. The trophy says one thing; the comment section insists on another. For an adult, that contradiction can be exhausting. For a 14-year-old, it can become a working theory of the self.

Social media turned spectators into judges with no responsibility

The comment section did not create racism, but it gave prejudice a direct route to a child who had just been placed under national attention. Mentissa has said she read the messages, felt paralyzed and eventually began believing them. She described being ashamed of the title she had won and stepping away from music for at least a year. Public.fr recounts how a celebration became a wave of online hatred that damaged her confidence.

This is the part talent television still tends to underplay. The broadcast ends, the applause fades and the contestant is left with an always-open feedback machine. The show presents exposure as opportunity, but exposure also means handing a young person’s identity to strangers who feel entitled to grade it.

And the public does not need to be right to be influential. It only needs to be loud, repetitive and close enough to be read. Mentissa’s account makes clear that the psychological damage came not from one isolated insult but from the accumulation: a flood of messages, attacks on her race, attacks on her singing and the insinuation that she had taken a place that belonged to someone else.

That should change how producers talk about “giving a platform” to young artists. A platform without meaningful protection can become a launchpad for harassment. The responsibility cannot end when the winner is announced.

Her comeback is inspiring, but it should not become an excuse

Mentissa’s return to The Voice in France is an uplifting reversal. The same broad television ecosystem that had once been tied to humiliation became, in 2021, part of her professional renewal. With Vianney’s team, she reached the final, and the song “Et Bam” helped propel her career. Ohmymag describes that later stage as a renaissance after her withdrawal from the spotlight.

But “she overcame it” is not an adequate ending. Resilience is valuable; it is also dangerously convenient when it allows everyone else to leave the system unchanged. Mentissa should not have needed another show, another mentor or another chapter of success to prove that the first victory was legitimate.

Her comeback does, however, expose the weakness of the old audience verdict. The people who tried to reduce her win to an identity dispute were not merely cruel; they were wrong about what the victory meant. It did not need their permission. The talent was present before the comments, during the backlash and after it.

The lesson for viewers is blunt: criticism of a performance is not a license to question a performer’s right to belong. The lesson for television is sharper still: if a show celebrates diversity onstage but leaves young contestants alone with racist abuse afterward, the real competition is happening off-camera—and the production has already failed.

Mentissa won twice, first with her voice and later by taking ownership of the story that followed. Our verdict is that the second achievement should not distract from the first injustice. Talent shows should stop treating the audience as an unquestionable jury. Sometimes the crowd is not discovering talent. Sometimes it is revealing its own prejudice.