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This Juneteenth, A Rededication to Environmental Justice, Now Under Attack
(Beyond Pesticides, June 18, 2026) Friday, June 19, is Juneteenth, a commemoration of the abolition of slavery and a celebration of human freedom. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr proclaimed. This truth raises societal concerns of continuing systemic environmental racism and institutional failures of predominately white institutions and the need to protect those at disproportionate risk, specifically Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, from agricultural and industrial pollution.
[Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom for the last 250,000 enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, but it is also a reminder that justice has not historically been “swift” or complete for Black Americans. The holiday commemorates the abolition of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth, officially recognized as a federal holiday since 2021, commemorates the arrival of Union soldiers in Galveston, Texas, to free enslaved people per the Emancipation Proclamation that was issued two and a half years prior. While June 19, 1865, does not mark the legal end of slavery nationwide, it was a crucial moment in the fight for freedom and continues to highlight the ongoing fight for human rights, equality, and environmental justice.]
In addition to elevated rates of adverse health effects, disproportionate impacts of chemical and pesticide exposure result in nutrition and medical injustice. “More than 1 in 3 Black (36.5 percent) adults age 18 and older reported household food insecurity in the last 12 months [as of January 2026],” according to findings from the 2025 sample of Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey (WBNS). In this same category, just 18.1 percent of white adults reported food insecurity. Black older adults with the age of 65 and over “were nearly three times as likely as older white adults to report food insecurity in 2025.” According to American Cancer Society, “Black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer than white women and are twice as likely to die if they are younger than 50.”
Access to food is considered a human right, including access to food that is not poisoned with agricultural chemicals designed to kill. However, common use of toxic pesticides in the production of crops causes harm to those who eat residues of the chemicals on their food, but also to workers engaged in its production, to communities contaminated by chemicals that move from the fields to the air, land, and water, and to those living near chemical manufacturing that causes exposure to factory emissions. The Eating With a Conscience database documents the poisonous pesticides allowed in the production of over 90 fruits, vegetables, and common food items, identifying the broad range of pesticides to which people are exposed. In this context, public health and environmental advocates continue to call for a significant public investment in the transition to organic crop production and land management systems that eliminate the chemical harm from petrochemical pesticide and fertilizer production, use, and disposal.
Peer-Reviewed Science on Disproportionate Harm
Two pieces, International Journal of Environmental Justice Research and BMC Public Health, underscore the disproportionate impacts that Black individuals and communities face from pesticide exposure. In the first piece, researchers review 128 peer-reviewed papers with an environmental justice lens on the disparities associated with pesticide exposure. One of the main citations, Pesticides and environmental injustice in the USA: root causes, current regulatory reinforcement and a path forward, finds that Black and Mexican American populations face five times higher pesticide exposure relative to white Americans, after assessing biomonitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2016.
There are additional key findings relevant to this discussion:
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Chemical biomarker concentrations among U.S. women using NHANES data are at elevated levels in African American and Mexican American women compared to non-poor non-Hispanic White women. (Donley et al 2022)
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Disease burden and associated costs with DDT-related legacy compounds are disproportionately concentrated in non-Hispanic Blacks, relative to their share of national population. For example, “non-Hispanic Black [individuals] bore most of the cost ($201.7 million or 74.5% of the total), while representing only 11.8% of the target population.” (Attina et al. 2020)
In the second paper, researchers, including Jabeen Taiba, PhD, utilize data from two separate indices—pesticide use data from USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Project and demographic and housing data based on the American Community Survey 5-year estimates conducted by to the U.S. Census Bureau. The top high-risk pesticide counties are broken down 143 counties across the 32 states, with the top states including Illinois (15), North Carolina (13), Michigan (10), California (9), Ohio (9), Indiana (8), Iowa (8), and Pennsylvania (6). Many of these same counties also face high socioeconomic vulnerability, like in California, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Illinois. More research must be done to contextualize this data in the context of aggregate baseline pollution via other exposure routes otherwise not considered in the registration of new active pesticide ingredients or review of existing pesticide registrations.
Previous Coverage|
The disproportionate impacts of cancers, including breast cancer, and pesticide exposure. A University of Michigan study finds a link between elevated rates of breast cancer incidents and chemical exposure from pesticides among African American women. Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, causing the second most cancer-related deaths in the United States. However, breast cancer outcomes differ significantly among women of various races/ethnicities, with African American women being 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than women of any other race. Furthermore, the incidence of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)—an aggressive, incurable, breast cancer subtype—is approximately three-fold higher in non-Hispanic Black women (NHBW) compared to non-Hispanic White women (NHWW). Although past studies suggest genetic and environmental factors interact to produce these differences in breast cancer outcomes, genetic factors only play a minor role while disparities (differences) in external factors (e.g., chemical exposure) may play a more notable role.
This study highlights the significance of understanding how chemical exposure drives disease outcomes and increases disease risk, especially for more virulent diseases that disproportionately impact specific communities. Prior research finds that differences in chemical exposure may explain racial disparities for several illnesses, and growing evidence suggests common chemical exposure patterns influence the risk of breast cancer. Therefore, advocates point to the need for national policies to assess exposure hazards’ involvement in disease development and diagnosis. The study researchers i note: “[…]African American women are disproportionately exposed to chemicals with breast cancer-associated biological activity at doses relevant to human exposure. Future studies should aim to analyze pathways and genes identified as active at biologically relevant concentrations as more (EPA) ToxCast assay data [chemical effects on many biological processes] becomes available. […]These experiments will help to inform whether [the] integration of exposure data from NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) with biological activity data from Toxcast is a relevant methodology to identify hazardous chemicals that may be involved in the development and prognosis of breast cancer.”
The study identifies 44 chemicals with considerable exposure inequalities, by race, that have biological activity concerning breast cancer. Aggressive cancer subtypes, including triple-negative breast cancer and others—all of which African American women are more likely to die—have stem-cell-like properties that allow pesticides to dysregulate hormonal pathways. The very chemicals for which this study finds racial disparities in biomarker concentrations also target specific stem cell-related genes, including AHR, SOX1, GLI1, and HIF-1A, responsible for normal bodily regulation and function. (See Daily News here.)
As covered above, the 2021 study published The BMC Public Health study, published in 2021, documents evidence that people in U.S. BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) communities, as well as those living in low-income communities, endure a high disproportionate rate of exposure to pesticides and a subsequent elevated risk of harm. It finds that such disparities exist in both urban and rural communities, and at all points in the pesticide “life cycle,” from manufacture to application. A section of Beyond Pesticides’ “Retrospective 2021: A Call to Urgent Action” is devoted to such inequities. Section IV, “Disproportionate Pesticide Harm Is Racial Injustice: Documenting Victimization: Structural Racism,” reviews Beyond Pesticides’ 2021 coverage of environmental injustice. It also calls for urgent action on federal and state “evaluations that go into toxic chemical regulation . . . to reform and replace the current regulatory decision-making process, which is empirically racist, with one that acknowledges and cares for those with the highest real-world vulnerabilities and exposure[s].” (See Daily News here.)
There are also examples of regulatory failures compounding themselves disproportionately in adversely impacted communities. Four banned organochlorine pesticides (OCP) are present in over 60% of a cohort of reproductive-age, black women in Detroit, according to a study published in Environmental Research by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH). OCPs are lipophilic (fat combining/dissolving), environmentally steadfast chemicals linked to harmful health effects. This study stresses the importance of monitoring pesticide accumulation, particularly regarding environmentally persistent chemicals and their metabolization via indirect exposure routes. The study highlights the significance of water monitoring—especially in light of historically disproportionately high hazards for people of color (e.g., Flint, Michigan)—and testing sources prone to OCP contamination. The researcher remarks, “The sources that we identified as potential OCP correlates should be tested for pesticide contamination,[…] especially drinking water.” (See Daily News here.)
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on March 12, 2025 that the agency would be shutting down its Environmental Justice and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices and staff at ten of the regional offices and the headquarters in Washington, D.C. Administrator Zeldin declared that this move implemented President Donald Trump’s Executive Order, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
In response to the admininstration’s ending of environmental justice programs, ten Democratic U.S. Senators—led by Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) and including Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Ron Wyden (D-OR)—are co-sponsoring the Empowering and Enforcing Environmental Justice Act of 2025 to Congress that would codify funding for environmental justice offices in the Department of Justice. (See Sen. Padilla’s press release here.) Senators Duckworth and Booker—founding co-chairs of the Senate Environmental Justice Caucus—also issued the following statement:
“Underserved communities in rural, urban and tribal areas already shoulder the brunt of the climate crisis and environmental injustice. These cuts and reversals will make it even harder for these communities to address some of our nation’s toughest challenges, including removing lead pipes, cleaning up dangerous toxins, addressing legacy pollution that has led to higher cancer, asthma and death rates, and tackling the climate crisis that threatens our health and collective planetary future….With so much at stake, we urge them to immediately reverse course and prioritize public health before billionaires’ wealth. Making it harder for Americans to breathe safe air and drink clean water is not making America great or healthy again.” (See Daily News here.)
Call to Action
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All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Sources: International Journal of Environmental Justice Research and BMC Public Health
