You're oversimplifying the issue.
Race is not the sole motivation behind farm attacks. Although it is often scapegoated as such by the overly simple-minded (of which this country has an abundance).
White farm owners are not the only victims of farm attacks - their black workers tend to suffer in great numbers as well. Even if that wasn't the case, colour being a common distinction between victim and victimiser does not necessarily mean that colour is the cause.
Boers are often very racist - jarringly and sometimes violently so. There is no shortage of stories about farmers punishing workers by:
- Locking them in confined spaces for extended periods of time without food
- Dragging them tied behind their bakkies (trucks) along dirt roads
- Physically beating them half to death
We end up with a lot of illegal immigrants, fleeing the conditions of the less western-based governments on the continent - the often end up working on the farms in the north of the country. A couple years ago, a group of these individuals asked for more money from their boer employer (as they were being paid about half of the already paltry amount stipulated for farm workers). This guy not only fired and evicted the workers, but he then gathered up a couple of his neighbours and set upon the workers with teargas, dogs and rubber bullets.
Bit of an overreaction? A little tyrannical?
I have no doubt that this farmer had his own reasons for reacting like he did (life is harsh in rural SA and compassion can quickly be taken as weakness) but if those workers had come back and killed him, surely you'd not reduce it to simply an issue of racism? The colour of the protagonists is simply an accident of history.
There is an element of vengeance and cultural obstinance on all sides of South Africa's issues.
That said, the most apparent pattern is that of colour - so that's the first place that both locals and finger-pointing international observers go to for their answers.
Two of the most damaging results of this are that:
- It becomes a daily challenge to live in this country and not be racist; and
- Legitimate solutions become difficult to find, because we've come to lean on satisfying answers like "blacks is lazy and stupid," or "whites is tyrannical and oppressive," as the root cause of all our problems.
Black and white kinda need to figure out that their problems are not skin deep.
If you'll permit my waffling, i'm going to draw on another analogy to try and illustrate my thus far ill-formed point.
The first time blood was spilt in a boer-bantu interracial conflict in this country, it was the blood of willingly unarmed white boers being slaughtered while attempting to engage in diplomatic discourse with a black tribal chief.
The boers had retrieved the chief's cattle from thieves, in exchange for a parcel of land in what the tribe claimed was its territory. The boer got the cattle back for the chief, using their rifles to do so. This technology was interpreted as witchcraft and the chief ordered the boers killed during negotiations.
Only someone with an agenda (unconscious or otherwise) would look at that and say, "see!? The blacks started it!"
It wasn't a matter of blacks killing whites, it was a matter of vastly different cultural groups miscommunicating and acting on the backwards viewpoints propagated by a worldview more limited than you and i can possibly fathom from our relatively privileged historical vantage point.
Rural (i use the term loosely) South Africa has not changed very much, in terms of mindset.
In townships and on farms, people still think as though it is the 16-1700s. You can go out into the sticks and find whole communities of black folk, living in clay huts, who haven't seen more than a handful of white people in their entire lives.
You can find white farmers living exactly as they would have lived during apartheid - and whose treatment of their workers would suggest that apartheid never ended.
Those stereotypes do not extend to everyone of a certain colour. And nor do the presumptions inherent to these stereotypes.
While boers are somewhat justified in their presumptions that they are now the victims of racial prejudice, that view is difficult to align with interracial interactions in industries whose working circumstances leave them less isolated from the trends and mores of society as a whole.
You're attempting to reduce a pretty packed history to accusations of empty racism, while accusing someone else of doing the same.
In many (though certainly not all) of these cases of farm attacks, what i suspect you're seeing play out is what an apartheid-era mindset looks like when it isn't backed by apartheid-era law and order - numbers win.
The short answer to your question:
Race is an element of the issue, but only the most shallow one. A volatile history, full of excuses for contemporary sins; African vs European worldviews; and desperately clung-to cultural ignorance on all sides, are all far more pertinent to reality.
If you think that this is a "cuck thought process" i would strongly recommend that you reassess your own worldview, and consider whether or not it is the sort that is likely to propogate an ongoing cycle of... unpleasantness.