I do think it is a foreseeable outcome of what happens when white people in wealthy nations choose to selfishly indulge their privilege and passively consume the reality of the rest of humanity as entertainment.

Yes, this, and that's really elegantly put. I think the question is so very much "how could she" but "how couldn't she," because she's reflecting really ingrained Western views of the world. For me it's the Slumdog Millionaire syndrome, where a happy ending makes all the rest of the suffering of the (ethnically other) millions all right, award-worthy, and without irony "absolutely amazingly wonderful" according to the DVD jacket. Her story (and I did read it all) was a classic Hollywood narrative, not even poorly written by those standards.

And we're all complicit in that. I think we choose to be educated otherwise, but that attitude you describe is very much the default.