six.u not working with dec formatter

I seem to be getting an error with the postprocessing in the latest master at CIT:

    if accuracy=='deg': return six.u(r'%i'%(sign*deg)+degsymb)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/six.py", line 621, in u
    return unicode(s.replace(r'\\', r'\\\\'), "unicode_escape")
TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported