If the right believes that cultural appropriation is not offensive, why are they making paper dolls that ridicule other cultures? Lionel Shriver was the keynote speaker at a private party for the libertarian magazine Reason held in New York City this week. At the party, Reason circulated a paper doll of Shriver, along with several options for “dressing” her. The paper outfits included Native American women’s clothing, a cowgirl’s, a South Asian woman’s sari, and of course a sombrero. The images in the handout originally ran in the February 2017 issue of Reason as illustrations for an interview with Shriver (though the full set of images did not appear in the article’s online version).

Courtesy of Reason Magazine

The sombrero is a reference to Shriver’s comments at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2016. During her speech, Shriver described “the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around ‘identity politics.’” A group of students at Bowdoin College who wore sombreros at a tequila-themed birthday party, she lamented, were subsequently accused of cultural appropriation by the student government. Shriver believed that the outrage over this incident would have serious implications for fiction writers, who would feel they could not create a variety of characters. As Reason’s editor in chief Katherine Mangu-Ward put it, “Shriver raised the specter of being ‘obliged to designate my every character an aging 5-foot-2 smartass, and having to set every novel in North Carolina,’ which would surely make for dull reading.” Shriver then took out a sombrero and placed on her head in front of the audience, claiming that writers needed to “preserve the right to wear many hats.”

Shriver makes a critique of cultural appropriation that is shared by many on the right. Cultural appropriation, she argued in her Brisbane speech, is actually a mark of appreciation for other cultures: “Exchanging ideas and practices,” she proposed, “is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.” In a similar vein, New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss recently insisted that “culture should be shared, not hoarded.” In her Reason interview, Shriver said that her “only regret with the way it became this international incident” was that “in the very act of dismissing a concept with no merit,” she had in fact “helped to perpetuate it.”

At Brisbane, Shriver argued that the concept of cultural appropriation was crushing free expression; it was a freedom of speech issue, she said. Yet it wasn’t Shriver’s words that made her speech attract so much attention. Shriver turned the wearing-of-hats metaphor (the author must become many people, do many types of thought) into a literal hat. I personally responded to this nonverbal gesture more strongly than to her words: the donning of a sombrero, an item commonly used to summarize and deride Mexican culture by, say, drunk white college students on Cinco de Mayo.

Lionel Shriver is wearing a sombrero while discussing right to be a bigot. It is quite a confronting start to #bwf16 pic.twitter.com/2Cjl2cl5yy — Dr Kirstin Ferguson (@kirstinferguson) September 8, 2016

The paper dolls that Reason distributed reenact this gesture yet again, and give the lie to Shriver’s claim that appropriation is mere appreciation. There’s a difference between sharing in another culture and making use of it in a condescending way. The paper outfits, which are in some cases strongly marked ethnically, reduce identity down to costuming. The figures are headless. The illustration is lighthearted, but this gesture of reduction—of complex peoples and histories to empty and headless outfits, interchangeable and undifferentiated—makes the joke feel clumsy and shallow. A culture is not something that you can shrug on and off like a jacket. People are not dresses. People are not hats.