Patricia J. Williams’s The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (The New Press, 2024) opens with a meditation on bodily and spiritual integrity, the distinction between constitutional and contractual law, and the enduring entanglement of these frameworks with race.
Williams begins with an image—featured on the book’s cover and the very thing that first drew me to it. The image’s provenance is initially unknown to her: “It depicts two men with halos—saints? holy men? priests?—presiding over the amputation of a leg apparently removed from an apparently dead Black man. The leg has been attached to the body of an apparently white figure, who one may surmise is still living […]” (1-2). Before identifying the painting’s historical context—she eventually learns it depicts the Miracle of the Black Leg, attributed to the twin physician-saints Cosmas and Damian in the third century—Williams allows her imagination to “spin cocoons of explanation” (10), inventing stories that defy both chronology and geography. This imaginative labor, both intellectual and affective, opens a generative interpretive field, linking figures as seemingly disparate as abolitionist Frederick Douglass and twenty-first-century amputee John Wood, the latter made famous by the “sad-funny” (4) documentary Finders Keepers (2015). Though amputation (or “Detachment,” the title of this chapter) is the surface-level connection between Douglass and Wood, the more profound link lies in Williams’s insight into “a shift in diction from constitutional vivacity to object-of-contract status” (6-7) that both men suffer from.
Williams references Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, where Douglass famously frames slavery’s violence as a kind of amputation. Douglass, Williams reminds us, also describes his escape from enslavement in blunt economic terms: he “stole” his own body back.
As “chattel,” [Douglass] was legally disassembled by a system of property in which he had no hand, yet with—and within—which he was intimately, inextricably subsumed. Enslaved bodies were amputated from generative categories like family, citizen, human being. Just as Douglass wrestled with that estrangement, so our body politic still lives with the odd aporia of dark bodies that walk about simultaneously owned, disowned, and fundamentally alien. (3)
At the heart of slavery’s legal and conceptual legacy, Williams argues, is the foundational jurisprudential distinction between constitution and contract—between “the vivacity of rights-bearing humanity and the civil death of objectification” (6). Constitutional law governs civic life, conferring legal personhood as an “inalienable” right. Contract law, by contrast, which concerns itself with “voluntary” agreements between private parties, has historically served to decorporialize human beings, reducing people to the status of juridical objects. The story of John Wood, among others, exemplifies how this structure persists today.
The book unfolds through what feels like a series of cautionary tales about what happens when contract becomes the sole framework for interpreting human value. Williams traces how the law has been used to preserve some bodies—“whole or in part, embryos, severed heads, amputated legs” (11)—deemed valuable, while excluding others deemed “expendable,” through lynching, redlining, selective fertilization, privatization, and more. “Ultimately,” she writes, “this book is my attempt to account for those who don’t fit in” (11).
The book is both less and more than I expected. Though somewhat disappointed by the lack of sustained legal-theoretical analysis, I was ultimately struck by Williams’s masterful weaving of legal cases (Wood v. Whisnant, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Heidemann v. Heidemann, Shelley v. Kraemer, District of Columbia v. Heller, among others) alongside reflections on contemporary American life and autobiographical elements. Subsequent chapters take up issues as varied as gun culture, COVID, digital surveillance, and book banning, all framed within a distinctive hybrid of memoir, legal commentary, and cultural critique.
Williams’s method may be understood through what philosopher Leonard Harris calls an “actuarial” approach: an approach that demonstrates rather than explains. Instead of pursuing a unified, causal account of racism (a strategy Harris critiques for inevitably encountering irresolvable anomalies), an actuarial method focuses on outcomes. It “tracks consequences, despite their ‘ultimate’ causal origin” (Harris 87), using indicators such as “death, mortality, morbidity, and irredeemable misery as primary indicators” (Harris 273) to map the global operations of racism across its many forms.
Williams’s work aligns with this actuarial sensibility, assembling a body of evidence that insists we examine racism through its material effects: its traces in bodies, institutions, and histories. In The Miracle of the Black Leg, she offers minimal abstract theorizing of the interrelated concepts of race and property. Yet her often unsettling case studies reveal how whiteness operates not only as an identity but as a historically and legally protected form of property—how law, like medicine, continues to encode racial hierarchies into the very structure of social life.
Chapter 3, “The Lone Ranger,” traces the rise of rugged, “cowboy or ‘frontier’” (30) individualism in the US. This “unapologetic ultra-singularity” (32), as Williams describes it, sees the transformation of the social into a fragmented whole of “ungovernable” fiefdoms of private interest—authorized by legal innovations such as Texas’s anti-abortion law SB8, which not only criminalizes abortion but deputizes private citizens to enforce it through civil suits.
This chapter also underscores how race continues to shape the distribution of societal benefits, including the benefit of the doubt. As Williams notes, “It is an unfortunate truism that white men flexing their muscles with military-grade weapons in demonstrations against state legislatures or local school boards are tolerated to a very different degree than would be similar posses of Black men armed to the gills” (30). She links this to the legacy of vigilantism licensing private agents to “hunt” fugitives for bounty—an early form of privatized law enforcement, “near identical in its framing to the Fugitive Slave Act” (31), and with chilling contemporary parallels.
In a striking passage, Williams also recounts the story of Gene Cranick, whose house was left to burn because he hadn’t paid a local, opt-in fire protection fee of $75. She describes him as an “actuarial Black man”: “Gene Cranick was white, but I think of him as an actuarial Black man, because he had the misfortune to live in an unincorporated area that had the limited services historically associated with Black neighborhoods” (41). This racialized geography of neglect, Williams shows, continues to shape much of the United States today, particularly in former slave states in the American South.
There are aspects of The Miracle of the Black Leg, and of this chapter in particular, that feel distinctly American. Take, for example, Williams’s discussion of so-called FASTER programs: three-day gun training courses for teachers funded by the Buckeye Firearms Foundation. “Trainees are asked ‘to close their eyes and imagine [a] student entering the classroom with a gun,’” she writes, “and then are taught how to command the grit necessary to kill that student” (79). This passage (my first encounter with such programs) is both shocking and surreal, reading more like dystopian science fiction than public policy.
Yet what Williams teaches in her book resonates far beyond the American context. Writing from the UK, I find her reflections on the immunity granted to police, particularly in the myriad cases involving disproportionate use of force against Black individuals, strikingly relevant. The findings of The People’s Tribunal on Police Killings in the UK affirm that this is not a uniquely American problem. Similarly, Williams’s critiques of federal COVID-19 policy—especially the erosion of collective responsibility—speak to broader global dynamics. As Williams observes:
Collectively, we Americans seem not now inclined to believe in the entanglements of a common fate. The very notion of public health has been undermined by ingrained brands of individualism so radical that even contagious disease is officially regulated by the vocabulary of ‘choice,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘personal responsibility.’ Many of us live in bubbles of belief that conceptual walls will protect us from things that are not easily walled: guns will bring peace; housing discrimination will bring bliss to soccer moms…. (55)
Against the backdrop of wishful governmental thinking, such as the deeply flawed pursuit of “herd immunity,” Williams calls for epistemic clarity: “We some consciousness about what we are doing when we confuse what we want with what is” (62).
And yet, as she shows, what “we” want sometimes does determine what is, or at least what is allowed to be. In Chapter 7, “Erasure,” Williams explores the strategic campaign, began in early 2020, against critical race theory, tracking how white grievance has been weaponized into ethnonationalist ideology. These attacks, she argues, “are neither random nor grassroots” (98), but orchestrated by figures like Christopher Rufo, who have transformed CRT into a convenient repository for white American anxieties—an “enforced oblivion” (88) campaign “targeting and tarring gay people, trans people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Asians, women, pregnancy, contraception, and whole realms of science” (98). “Like all good propaganda,” she writes, “its object exists in the bleary eye of the beholder” (102). Most anti-CRT legislation contains nearly identical language, prohibiting any teaching that could cause a student to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex” (101). As Williams notes, “The discomfort of public school students—from kindergarten through college—becomes, per se, a violation that may invoke monetary fines for teachers, risk their being fired, or result in withholding funds from individual schools or entire districts….If students become upset, heads will roll” (102). Yet, she insists, “We cannot legislate feelings about race into silence” (103).
Williams’s response to this moment is neither cynical nor resigned. She remains committed to beginning from what we share—our common vulnerability. Her writing is imbued with a quiet insistence on generosity and patience: “In a world of good faith, we work hard to bridge the distances between us….It takes commitment to press through the frightened emotions that any controversial subject might evoke” (103). At times, this commitment to inclusion can feel too accommodating, as in her reference to “good people who….helicoptered everywhere” (171)—wealthy donors she encountered at a fundraising event—a phrase that may strike more abolitionist-leaning readers, like myself, as overly conciliatory. Yet it is precisely this generosity that makes Williams’s book so accessible. She rejects purism and invites readers to reflect on their own complicity and positionality within a deeply unequal global order.
Reading Williams’s final chapters, which include a tender reflection on her late parents in their hospital beds, I found my mind drifting to Gaza, to those who die prematurely, without care, in places without hospitals. Though I imagine the book was completed before the latest and most catastrophic stage of Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s striking that Palestine is not mentioned, especially given Williams’s meditations on trauma and genocide in these pages. This absence is not a shortcoming, but a testament to the speed at which our worlds continue to shift. The slices of watermelon Williams finds family members eating in a 1942 photograph signify differently for me now. Still, her words on remembrance offer some comfort: “The dead are mine….And they speak to me. They speak through me” (216). So too does her enduring optimism, held against the brokenness of the present moment.
By tracing the subtle and brutal ways the law mediates race, value, and vulnerability, Williams compels us to reckon with the broken architecture of legal personhood and the imaginative labor required to rebuild it. If she begins with a severed leg, she ends by asking what it might take to reassemble a body politic—and a form of sociality—worth belonging to.
