Last Friday, HYBE and Geffen Records announced that Katseye member Manon Bannerman will be temporarily stepping away from the group to “focus on her health and wellbeing.” Shortly after, Manon sent a message directly to fans via Weverse, clarifying that she’s healthy and okay, but that “sometimes things unfold in ways we can’t fully control, but I’m trusting the bigger picture.” This statement set off a whirlwind of fan speculation about whether the unexpected hiatus was Manon’s decision, and just how temporary it’ll actually be. It was a saddening turn of events for many who’ve supported the six-piece girl group since their 2024 debut. But there’s a growing legion of fans online who see the move as a continuation of a bothersome girl group tradition: when the sole Black member gets sidelined, unfairly characterized by stereotypes.
It looks like Manon herself supports this discussion, mainly because she liked (and then unliked) a video posted by the creator Simone Umba about it this past weekend. In it, Simone unpacks Manon’s journey as Katseye’s only Black member (she is half-Ghanaian and half-Swiss-Italian), and she tracks the history of Black girl group members like Normani (Fifth Harmony) and Leigh-Anne Pinnock (Little Mix), who were unfairly treated by their management and faced racist abuse from supposed “fans.”
“Why is it that whenever we have a sole Black girl in a girl group, she is the victim and the most suffering?” Simone asked. “Imagine you’re the only Black girl in your group, [and] you have half of the internet berating you, calling you lazy, calling you difficult.” Pinnock actually spoke directly to this experience in a 2021 documentary, citing how fans would ignore her at meet and greets, and she felt a pressue to work ten times harder for the attention her white bandmates would receive: “There’s only so much you can take of feeling like you are the invisible one, or you’re being overlooked.”
Growing up as a girl group super fan, it felt like the Black members who offered me a semblance of representation were treated like diversity-quota-filling afterthoughts by their management, marketers, and certain fans. I clocked every instance that Normani wasn’t in the middle of a red carpet photo, or when Leigh-Anne didn’t get the center spot during a performance. And I deeply internalized it when I noticed some would have significantly fewer social media followers than their peers. This track record is what, to me, made Manon’s role in Katseye feel revolutionary during the group’s nascent era.
In the 2024 series Popstar Academy, which documents Katseye’s grueling development process, we see that Manon was scouted to join based on aura alone— a casting lead detected a “star quality” on her social media pages, and had her flown out to train with other young, hopeful contenders. She went on to basically serve as the group’s “visual,” an unofficial position in traditional K-pop groups designated to the member who best fits conventional beauty standards and can act as a visual draw for potential fans. As someone who grew up seeing artists like Normani and Leigh-Anne stuck at the end in group photos, with their names often listed last in media coverage, it was mind-blowing to see that, in Katseye’s case, the Black girl was gearing up to be the front-facing representative. To have this (admittedly problematic) role designated to the sole Black girl felt like a turning point for what it means to be “the only one.”
But as fans have pointed out en masse in the days following Manon’s hiatus announcement, it seems she was not immune to the back-burner fate that many of her predecessors saw. Online, Manon supporters are circulating videos of choreography that hid her in performances, and group photo ops she was blocked off or omitted from. They’re misdeeds that, from an extra-forgiving perspective, you could cast as purely circumstantial: maybe they were the product of a choreographer’s unfortunate oversight or poorly planned photo framing. But for fans, particularly Black ones, who’ve been conditioned to detect every inkling of a Black group member being treated unfairly, as they have so often and for so long, these read as glaringly undeserved offenses. And they pale in comparison to the vitriol from fans who feel emboldened to hurl insults their way from behind a screen, insults rooted in regressive stereotypes, no less.
One common fan narrative, dating back to the Popstar Academy era, paints her as lazy. Proponents of it will reference rehearsals, performances, and press appearances she’s missed due to illness. She addressed the heavy toll this characterization took on her during a recent interview. “Being called lazy, especially as a Black girl, is not fair,” she told The Cut. “Now I feel like I always need to put in extra work to prove something, even though I really don’t.”
But before Manon was called lazy, Normani was deemed a “bully” (in 2016, she left Twitter after experiencing an onslaught of racist abuse for calling a fellow group member “quirky and cute”), and far before that, the Spice Girls labeled Mel B’s outgoing nature as “scary” rather than spirited or bold. It seems like to be the sole Black girl in a girl group is to be stereotyped, sidelined, and mistreated in some capacity by bigoted factions of your group’s fandom. And this is hardly a case-by-case experience, but an invariable outcome of being the “only one” that fans watch every “only one” go through time and time again.
As a Black woman, no matter how old you get or how little you actually stream the music, it’s always painful to watch this ritual play out. Because it acts as a highly visible version of what non-famous Black girls in the minority experience regularly: deprioritization and dehumanization. We see cruelty casually hurled towards these celebrities, under the assumption that their Blackness renders them less susceptible to emotional injury. But it happens on a less public scale all the time, too. Not every Black girl will be in a chart-topping girl group, but most can speak to these experiences, and the overwhelming paranoia that follows them, convincing us that every casual slight is rooted in bigotry or unconscious bias.
Manon’s Katseye exit, temporary as it may be, stings more when you consider the girls who came before her. And it seems less irrational for fans to closely dissect her pop group’s social dynamics when you consider that the group’s not just entertainment, but a product developed for consumption. Thus, it’s engineered to reflect our social hierarchies and practices. Factors like these will definitely make you further scrutinize a girl group member who’s been shoved to the back row.
Since last Friday’s announcement, Black artists like SZA and Chloe Bailey have voiced their support for Manon, and she’s followed fellow Black girl group alums like Normani and Leigh-Anne on social media. “We need to protect each other,” Leigh-Anne replied to one fan in reaction to Manon’s social media activity. The “need” itself is dismaying, but as Leigh-Anne suggests, there’s an instinct, rooted in a long history of marginalization, for Black women to protect and defend fellow Black women who are being unfairly maligned. And that inclination isn’t limited to Black girls who’ve been the only one in a pop group. It extends to those who’ve been the only one in any room at all.
