Cornel defines the idea of ​​the “normative gaze” using the relationship between the historical background that provides the ideals of beauty and the facts of white supremacy. Ideals of beauty are those that seem to be deeply rooted in simplicity, symmetry, and what eventually came to be considered “normal.” This production of normality through art and literature that Cornel tries to show goes beyond the proportion of the body and the structure of the face, but in fact it also replaces race.

From the literature of Wincklemann, who believes that Greece houses the ultimate in beauty, to Paracelsus of 1520 who affirms that black or primitive people were of different origin from those of European nature, to Buffon and Linnaeus, who held the position that all races were a variation. of one with differences explained by weather or other chance. Each analysis provides a comparison between differences, variations and measures to find some type of normality or position to classify.

Cornel agrees with Foucalt in his saying that, “Natural history … constitutes a full domain empiricity as at once describable and sortable.” Which means that it is natural history and therefore a natural tendency to classify and organize (in this case, human beings). That classification can certainly come from many different directions, but poignantly for our discussion, it simply comes from skin color and ethnicity.

From this, Cornel determines that this is where white supremacy has sprung up: the need and the tendency to classify and categorize. White supremacy then becomes the first real modern discourse of the modern West to produce what can be called the “normative gaze.”