Kate Stewart: Should a white girl dress as Moana?

As a self-confessed PC despiser, I've grown accustomed to the many absurd and outrageous calls for modifications to our behaviour.

With the passing of Halloween, ask yourselves this: How many white girls, oops ... not gender neutral enough, how many white children did you see in Moana costumes?

Probably none, because it was deemed not PC, with some telling wannabe white wearers to stick to Snow White. That view could be seen as racist and culturally insensitive but probably won't rank a mention, even though follow-up tweets came with a threat of physical violence.

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According to one parenting activist, dressing children up as Disney's Moana this Halloween would have been racist.

Writing in her blog Raising Race Conscious Children, parent blogger activist Sachi Feris urged parents not to dress their children up as characters from backgrounds different to their own as it "makes fun of someone else's culture".

Although many would see the strong-minded Moana as a perfect role model, Feris said it's racially insensitive and risks parodying Polynesian culture. How is it that every time skin colour is involved it insidiously gets turned into a racial issue?

Do we have a barrage of fair-skinned people telling darker-skinned folk that they may not wear the costumes of traditionally white characters such as ghosts, Freddy Kruger or Morticia or don the white mask from Scream?

It appears we are wanting to apply limitations to only a certain group of people. If whites were to make such a call about costumes of white characters, they'd be labelled as racist, bigoted and un-PC.

Do the supposed oppressed get to have it all while others can only have what they are permitted to have?

Us and them - is this what being overly PC has reduced us to? An almost separatist type of behaviour. It's disturbing.

The article highlighting the Moana issue was published with responding tweets. One argued that if we promote separate Halloween costumes based on colour, how much longer before we're back to drinking at separate water fountains.

And why are examples of black against white racism never highlighted or publicised?

If the "N" word is deemed offensive, is it any worse than my red-haired son being called a Ranga - as in orangutan? I find this term equally as racist but, because he's not black, when I complained it was fobbed off as just "kids being kids".

Had my son retaliated and labelled his non-white verbal abuser a rock ape, he might have been suspended from school. Both terms refer to hairy primitive beasts so how can one be deemed as harmless teasing and the other as racist? Talk about double standards.

What sort of message are we sending when it's okay to make derogatory remarks about a white person's colour - it doesn't seem like fair treatment by my understanding of the terms, let alone politically correct.

I thought the whole concept of being PC was to help build bridges, not burn them.

I once thought that being PC was just annoying and pointless, today I firmly believe it's doing more harm than good.

The decision by Middlemore Hospital not to associate itself with a Ronald McDonald House due to its link with fast food and, thus, childhood obesity emphasises my point.

We now live in a society where you can't even look at someone for fear of being labelled a pervert or invading their personal space. Fathers are afraid to bath their baby daughters due to possible false allegations of child abuse and kids are going off the rails like never before as we pander to the PC trend of letting them express themselves however they bloody well wish. No labels, no judgement, no restrictions.

Despite our bid to appear forward-thinking, we must stop and ask ourselves if maybe we've actually taken a few steps back.

The PC brigade should be educating us that racism is not as simple as white against black. Two races of the same colour can despise one another, just as blacks can be intolerant of whites. No one ethnicity or skin colour has the monopoly on racism. It can affect us all.

Mark my words, if this madness continues it will only be a matter of time before the All Blacks will be looking for a new name.

■ Multicoloured feedback welcome:investik8@gmail.com