Is it okay for white children to dress up as Moana for Halloween?

Mothers in the US are struggling to decide whether Moana is okay as a Halloween costume for their white children. Photo / Supplied

With Halloween fast approaching in the US, many people are trying to find a costume for their children.

Judging by a number of threads in different websites and online forums, that is no easy feat.

The success of animated movie Moana means that a lot of children want to dress up as the Polynesian Disney princess, but parents online are debating whether that is even okay.

Moana is a popular choice with children this Halloween. Photo / Amazon

An article published in Cosmopolitan this week highlights the dilemma and argues that dressing up as Moana is the height of cultural appropriation.

The article got social media fired up with many saying that accusing the costume of being "culturally insensitive" is just PC gone mad.

I’m Samoan myself and I’m getting sick of other people saying “nope you can’t do this, it’s cultural appr...” No. Moana is Western culture.

— El Haroldo (@ElHarold0) October 24, 2017

Country overcame segregation decades ago. Not many of us eager to return to it. Separate costumes? Do we go back to separate fountains too?

— M Lynne S (@mlysimonsen) October 24, 2017

Liberals:
Disney is racist for having only white stories!
Yay! New ethnic princesses!
Dressing up your daughter as Moana is racist!!

— Chad Felix Greene (@chadfelixg) October 24, 2017

Other people, however, agreed with the article's author and argued that a whole culture should not be reduced to a costume.

If I catch a white person in a Moana costume you’re getting hands. Stuck to Snow White.

— cowboy emoji (@space_cowb0_y) October 24, 2017

Earlier this month, a US mum wrote a blog post warning that the Moana costumes available for sale this Halloween were "cultural appropriation".

Sachi Feris wrote on raceconscious.org that she was concerned when her 5-year-old daughter, who is white, first told her she wanted to be Moana for Halloween.

Her daughter, she said, wanted to be either Moana or Scandinavian Queen Elsa from the movie Frozen.

"I had some reservations regarding both costume choices ... about cultural appropriation and the power/privilege carried by whiteness, and about whiteness and standards of beauty," she wrote.

In the end, her daughter decided to be Elsa for Halloween which got Feris worried all over again, this time about how the costume could be teaching her brunette girl that one must be white and blue-eyed to be a "beautiful" princess.