fly in the buttermilk

Definitions

1. 1

   A black person in a predominantly white group of people.

   • 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.
   • 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. 2

   Synonym of fly in the ointment (“something that spoils something else”).

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

The neighborhood