Getting Ready: Nicole Lee

A lot of energy and blogs have been dedicated to hyping up or refuting the apparent efforts of Nicole Lee and the Urban Peace Movement. This has largely been centered around an email purportedly from Nicole Lee.
READ THE EMAIL HERE... or anywhere online

This email has been largely addressed in previous blog posts. I won't re-address it now except to again note that it is nothing short of collaboration with the police/state. In the email Lee invokes the names of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton to defend a position none of them would have defended.

On the Urban Peace Movement's website, there is no text of the infamous email. However, under An Open Letter, Lee claims "Someone has even gone so far as to impersonate me, sending a very inflammatory e-mail made to look as if I had sent it." She isn't entirely clear and doesn't denounce any specifics from the infamous email which isn't really inflammatory. She even invokes the COINTELPRO responsible deaths of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins as examples of why not to buy into snitch-jacketing. So, all that Nicole Lee has to do is specifically denounce the infamous email and the directives in it and she gets a free pass as far as I am concerned. Afterall, she is not the issue here. She is simply a manifestation of how capital and the state de-fang and co-opt popular struggles.

Lee also is big on "mindfulness practice" which believes that People of Color holding religious vigils will stop violence.

Regardless of the verdict, Nicole Lee (and others of her ilk) should be held accountable for her words and actions. She is nothing more than a career politician. She claims to represent the peoples' interests but has cozied up next to the state.

Remember her name. You can bet she has plans to stick around and use her street cred as political currency.