There is nothing quite as ludicrous as white guys who whine that complaints of racism are exaggerated.

But ever since Monday, when Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones said he heard racial slurs yelled at him during a game at Fenway Park, there has been a strong pushback on social media, on the comment boards of newspapers, and especially on sports talk radio.

There are many who don’t believe Jones when he says he heard someone yelling the n-word at him from the bleachers.

The fact that so many other players, including Red Sox players, have said they have heard racial slurs at Fenway Park doesn’t persuade them that it is a problem worthy of all this attention.

They don’t believe Jones because no one, with one dubious exception, has come forward on Twitter or Facebook or called a radio talk show or told a newspaper or a television station that they heard the slurs. They say they’ve gone to many games at Fenway and never heard the n-word, as if that proves anything.

They believe that anyone who yelled the n-word would have been confronted by other fans.

They find it suspicious that no cellphone video has surfaced.

Their skepticism, if not open cynicism, is fueled by inconsistencies in the story of a Woburn teenager who was quoted in a Mike Lupica column on the Sports On Earth website saying he was sitting in the bleachers Monday and heard a drunken man yelling the n-word at Jones.

The kid told Lupica that the beer vendor working in the bleachers refused to serve the man. But there are no beer vendors in the bleachers.

That 17-year-old kid has been subjected to vicious personal attacks by a sports website.

It is true that, so far, no independent corroboration of Jones’ complaint about the n-word being hurled at him has surfaced publicly.

But it is incontrovertible that someone threw a bag of peanuts at Jones as he approached the Orioles dugout.

On Thursday, The Boston Globe published a story about a white man named Calvin Hennick who brought his biracial 6-year-old son and black father-in-law to Fenway Park on Tuesday.

Hennick said that after a Kenyan woman finished singing the national anthem, a white man he did not know leaned over to him and complained that the singer had “[n-ed] up’’ the song.

Hennick was so stunned by what the man said that he asked him if he had heard him right. The man confirmed that indeed he had said it.

Hennick found an usher, who brought in Red Sox security. Questioned by Red Sox security, the guy denied saying it. The Red Sox believed Hennick and banned the guy for life.

But on Thursday morning, many of the same voices that said they don’t believe Adam Jones said they didn’t believe Calvin Hennick, either.

They said it was too convenient that Hennick had at one time worked as a freelancer for the Globe, that he has in the past written about his biracial family. There had to be an agenda.

Well, there is an agenda. It’s called common decency. When people act like jerks, whether they’re racist jerks or just plain jerks, they should be called out for it.

Paying for a ticket doesn’t give you the right to scream vile abuse, racial or otherwise, at players or other spectators.

There is a natural inclination to be defensive when deliberately provocative talking heads on sports cable networks describe Boston as the most racist sports town in America.

And, frankly, it’s hard to take anyone who says something like that seriously.

But by employing dubious logic to focus so obsessively on a single symptom rather than the wider problem, the doth-protest-too-much crowd is unwittingly playing into the hands of the very people who look at Boston and shake their heads.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com