I WISH WE COULD. It was such an awful moment -- like, Russell spent the whole book learning that Arabic people are people too, and then she starts to recognize Ali and Mahmoud's intelligence and to appreciate desert living and whatever, and then they're surprise!white? Way to negate everything in that arc! The Russell-judges-PoC-and-learns-valuable-lesson approach was already problematic, it didn't need any more help.

I have clearly had this stored up in me for ages now.