“Race baiting” is a fairly incendiary way of putting it. The way I would put it would be to say that there’s a contemporary fixation on race that gets naively projected into other times and places in ways that are anachronistic and miss a lot of nuances. There’s also a tendency to overcorrect for past instances of this.
The thing is, you can motivate almost any oversimplified narrative with mutually exclusive rationales. Maybe you claim that all cowboys were white because you’re racist and you don’t think black people had the heroic qualities necessary for herding cattle. Or you could claim that all cowboys were white because the evil white man didn’t allow blacks to settle the frontier. I actually think this story is more on the side of nuance: it turns out some West Texas cowboys were black, some were white, and people on the frontier didn’t have the same obsession with maintaining racial systems of social hierarchy the way people did in the Deep South. Some of them would still be racist but a black man could handle those differences the same way men in that culture handled many of their differences, with his fists. And when this particular black cowboy did that, it worked out fine.
The odd claim about the etymology of the word “cowboy” does sort of hint and edge towards a completely different totalizing mythology of “actually, all cowboys were black”, but this also smells like bullshit to me. There were almost certainly more black cowboys than you’d assume based on watching old westerns, but they weren’t all black and none of the people in that place and time comfortably fit into any side of any contemporary culture war anyway. They were different people with ideas and motivations of their own, not just symbols in your contemporary culture war.