“Racially biased” is the term that the co-chairwoman of the group Time Out From Testing, Jane Hirschmann, is using to describe the standardized test the city’s third-graders took this week. She’s one of what seems to be an unfortunately large number of New Yorkers who don’t hesitate to hurl accusations of racism without justification. Prompted by Ms. Hirschmann’s complaint about white students performing better than blacks or Hispanics on some of the test’s questions, we had a look at the test ourselves.

We found that rather than being racist, the exam’s authors seemed to bend over backwards to be inclusive. One reading passage from last year’s third-grade test was headlined,”Where does Tanisha like to be?” Another was headlined “Japanese New Year” and describes “Miki and her family dressed in red and white kimonos.”Another reading passage included a reference to “Miriam Rodriguez” and “Jaimie Miller.” The next reading passage is about the baseball player Roberto Clemente, and reports, “The people of Puerto Rico were proud of Roberto Clemente.”

On this year’s test, a reading passage describes “Mrs. Lin, a kind woman who lives alone with her cat, Ying Ying.” Another passage asks,”How do fortunes get inside cookies?”The passage with “Miriam Rodriguez” and “Jaimie Miller” is repeated on this year’s test. These tests aren’t long, and a fair number of the questions are about animals, like sea urchins or nondescript birds, that have no obvious racial associations. We’re not quite sure what to make of the reference to an “Eskimo dog.”

New York’s public school pupils come from famously and wonderfully diverse backgrounds, and it makes sense that the reading test would reflect that fact in some general way. But it would be absurd to demand that Asian-Americans students be given a test in which 100% of the reading examples feature people with stereotypically Asian names wearing kimonos, or to ask that Puerto Rican students take a different test in which all of the questions are about Roberto Clemente and other famous Puerto Ricans.

Racism is a problem in New York, in its schools as in the rest of the city. And it is sometimes subtle. But confronting it requires the ability to dismiss false claims, and the charge against this test strikes us, on the evidence available, as one of those.