I'm not certain whether you decided here if you were going to try to make a (reasonably) rational argument or not. I think yes, but unfortunately you have chosen two sources that themselves do an incredibly bad job of making their case rationally. This leaves us without much cause to assent to their claims, save perhaps for a lingering resentment at those who might claim to be more rational and we can show them how rude we think that is.

George Yancy's argument, which you quoted, is so daft that I have trouble believing that he even finds it compelling himself. What if it's not George Floyd and a black student, but an Asian student who has been reading about anti-Asian violence? What if it's a white student whose beloved dog has just died? What if it's a black man who understands statistics and realizes that given that he commutes by car, he's tens to hundreds of times more likely to die in a car crash than be killed by police, and can't stop thinking about twisting screaming metal, being battered and crushed and beaten, life ebbing away to nothingness even as the fire department and ambulance sirens approach?

And he didn't even mention Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

For his part, Smith, in the interview at least, fails to entertain even a single alternative hypothesis to "rationality causes irrationality" like, maybe, extreme dogma causes irrationality. As a demonstration that rationality does not perfectly hold dogma or cruelty or irrationality or whatever a bay, sure--but do we think this is news? And as a demonstration that there is even a danger there instead of it always being better than the alternative, it falls completely flat.

Your own arguments are rather better, but unfortunately they end up leaning on the accuracy of Smith. If Yancy had made a really powerful argument maybe that could have helped, but he didn't. The derepression of bias by a feeling of objectivity is a good point, but is only suggestive--you would also need to show that as a whole the community avoids the kind of reflective behaviors that could more than compensate for any individual flaws.

It's entirely possible for people to get "I am better and therefore can be sloppy in my thinking" confused with "I am careful in my thinking and that makes me better at some things". But it doesn't follow that there's anything wrong with a rationalist perspective because what isn't demonstrated is that this is a particularly grave danger for people nominally committed to a rational approach.