The Shrinking American Dream
by Glenda Shepard
This is Glenda Shepard from Yucca Corners Farm in Stanton County KS. This is my Radio Readers BookByte for The American Dream by Shing Yin Khor. This is the second book in HPPR’s Spring Read of 2026 for the Radio Readers Book Club.
I have to admit I read this book out of order. First, I read The Grapes of Wrath. Then I read Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like: The Life and Writings of Will Rogers by Joseph H Carter. Next, I read The American Dream. I don’t think switching the order made any difference but wanted you to know.
I‘ll start my BookByte with the epilogue. At the end of her book Shing explains her drive down Route 66 was in April 2016, six months before Trump first took office. She adds, “Since then, a lot of things have changed.”
How true! Now in 2025 and at least a year into Trump’s second term, you have to read the rest of the epilogue with a large lump of salt. In 2019 when the book was published, Shing believed a “brown girl could drive America fearlessly.“ Her light brown skin would protect her. She promises her little dog Bugs she will go and ends with, “Can’t let those jerks keep us down.”
I admire her bravery. She takes her stand without anonymity, no cover that government employees and members of threatened groups are resorting to or looking for protection from Trump’s end of inclusion policies. Knowing how much Trump and those who elected him have shrunk the American Dream, I’m less optimistic about Shing’s plans.
For anyone traveling on anything less than AirForce One, ICE agents are among us. Not just in Minneapolis, Chicago or Las Angelis but Stanton County’s rural dairies and in Garden City. I stated in my earlier BookByte for The Grapes of Wrath the born-in-America Joads would have been detained. Light brown skin isn’t white enough. As we know, being a U.S. citizen didn’t protect Renee Good or Alex Pretti from being killed.
Should Shin make another Route 66 trip in 2026, her light brown skin wouldn’t be enough to grant her immunity.
My white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant complexion wouldn’t spare me. An ICE agent or a National Guard soldier deployed to the streets of Garden City or Johnson could challenge my citizenship. I can’t instantly prove my citizenship. I don’t carry my passport with me. Do you?
It’s a crucial thing that Shing and other writers carry on the fight for the fairness a democracy must have – even out here on the High Plains.
I’m Glenda Shepard. Thank you for listening to my Radio Readers BookByte of The American Dream for HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club.
