Sectarianism and anti-Irish racism were never Liverpool's only problems. During the nineteenth century, a wide variety of immigrant groups came to Liverpool: Irish, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Asians, and Africans, the arrival of each grouping triggering some reaction. As Herson states, ‘Liverpool's very cosmopolitanism contributed to its propensity to racism’ as ‘the city's society … negatively marked out ethnic and racial differences and in so doing encouraged conflictual inter-ethnic relations’. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, at least, the dominance of the conflict between Liverpool's native white community and the immigrant white Irish community, led to conflict between whites and other minority groups becoming overlooked amid the omnipresent main Protestant versus Catholic sectarian fracture. Herson acknowledges:

Prejudice and discrimination against Liverpool's other minority communities were a sideshow. This chapter concentrates on Liverpool's black and Chinese communities, primarily due to their position as the largest two minority groups in Liverpool throughout the latter stages of the twentieth century. Moreover, although the port has the ‘oldest sizeable, settled African, South Asian and Chinese community in the country’, the black and Chinese communities have very different experiences due to the varying degrees of racist intensity they have experienced in Liverpool.

Liverpool's main social problem may have been sectarianism before its ostensible replacement by anti-black racism in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, Murray Steele highlights how Liverpool's main division may have added to an increasingly racist perception of black people: