People always talk about literacy acquisition, but what makes it so that the person is able to even achieve acquisition in the first place? Learning about someone’s background, or primary Discourse, not only gives one an insight into who the person is but also why they are who they are (Gee 8). Primary Discourses can give a view on how a student is able to acquire literacy in many ways later in life. Depending on your background or upbringing, it can make it harder for one to acquire literacy due to their race or gender. Even if two different people lived in the same area, one person may have a harder time with receiving an education, while the other gets through it with ease, all due to the two people’s different primary Discourses (Brandt 561). I believe that it is true that from person to person, the way one is able to acquire literacy, is through one’s primary Discourse, the way we first “make sense of the world and interact with others,” it “constitutes our original and home-based sense of identity” (Gee 7,8). In order to truly find out if this is true, I examined an archive of literacy narratives, pulling evidence from victim narratives and outsider narratives. Literacy narratives about race, gender, and overall background helped to discover more about how primary Discourses play a role in literacy acquisition. I have found that, in most cases, background and upbringing is the way that people are shaped, making it harder, or easier, for one to acquire such a Discourse. Taking these things into consideration, one could make an effort to be able to change the ways children are brought up to help them acquire things easier. Though certain variables about someone cannot be changed, other efforts could be taken up to compensate for such things.