“White Entitlement in White Sanctuaries: Spatial Awareness in the Nacional Museo d’Art De Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain”

Research since the late 2000s has expanded upon the notion of white space(s), particularly in the context of racialized social systems. More recent scholarship has interrogated the ways in which systemic white supremacy is facilitated by racialized space. White space is contentious, particularly since disrupting it means also disrupting the white supremacist normative status quo and Whites’ fantasy(ies) of control over space and place. In previous work, we contended that in any racialized social system, white sanctuaries serve to reaffirm Whites' perceived ideas about the racial order, often situated in white supremacist logic and normativity. In this paper, we extend our research to examine how white sanctuaries facilitate a sense of belonging for many whites through entitlement. Specifically, we look at patron’s spatial awareness of museum art at the Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), a premier internationally recognized museum housed in the Palau Nacional de Montjuïc, built for the 1929 International Exhibition. The empirical analysis of this study is based on collaborative ethnographic data collected over a three-year period conducted by the first two authors, and consists of hundreds of photos and hundreds of hours of participant observations and field notes. The data are analyzed using descriptive methods and content analyses. We identify four types of white patrons based on their levels of comfortability in navigating museum spaces, their sense of spatial awareness, and their levels of consistent proximity to museum art: 1) the art molester, 2) the spatial disrupter, 3) the rule-conscious patron, and 4) the guarded patron. Our findings highlight white entitlement as yet another way in which museums, as white sanctuaries, serve to reify whites’ sense of belonging and their perceived ideas about the racial and social order of society. Our paper also extends sociological research on how white spaces are maintained in racialized organizations.