In social justice education a tension sometimes emerges between the complex ideas we want participants to grapple with and the relatively straightforward activities we use to communicate those ideas. We adapt learning activities to meet participants' evolving needs and to communicate emerging theories and analyses, but sometimes adjusting an activity's content is not enough; the activity's very structure can contradict our stated frameworks and undermine the content we wish to convey. In this article I explore two activities commonly used for teaching about systems of oppression whose structures inadvertently support linear, single-issue thinking, and largely fail to account for intersectionality, despite educators' best efforts to incorporate more complex content. I describe an alternative activity, structured around Iris Marion Young's The Five Faces of Oppression, that can be used to teach about multiple, interlocking systems of oppression while highlighting rather than obscuring the specificity of interrelationships among those systems.