fly in the buttermilk

English

Noun

fly in the buttermilk (plural flies in the buttermilk)

1. (colloquial) A black person in a predominantly white group of people.
   • 2008, Bernestine Singley, When Race Becomes Real, page 108:

     You can do the same in parts of Ward Three and see black folks sprinkled like “flies in the buttermilk.” Two Districts of Columbia, two different realities.

   • 2012, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color, page 38:

     Once on-island, the black colony did not want to be reminded by whites or blacks of the racial divisions that existed “off-island.” Visitors did not want to be flies in the buttermilk […]

2. Synonym of fly in the ointment (“something that spoils something else”)
   • 2013, Lewis P. Hussell, A Commentary on Amos, Ezra, Esther, Haggai, Nehemiah, page 246:

     Discovery of this document was a fly in the buttermilk of Tattenai.

   • 2016, John Green, The Wind in the Junipers:

     As life has a way of doing sometimes, just when things are going well, something comes along and puts a fly in the buttermilk. Two things happened in 1905 that changed things a lot for me. First off, the hotel burned down.