The current hellscape that is Virginia state politics right now started with a single item: a yearbook, specifically the one from Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school in 1984, which contained a photo depicting a man in blackface next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

Northam has wavered on whether he is in fact one of the men pictured — in his original statement, he apologized and said that he was indeed in the photo, though he didn’t specify which person. But the next morning, he claimed that actually, it wasn’t him: In a press conference, he said there was “no way that I have ever been in a KKK uniform,” but that he did have a recollection of once using shoe polish for blackface as part of a Michael Jackson costume during a dance contest.

BREAKING: Gov. Ralph Northam yearbook page shows blackface and Klan photohttps://t.co/6A89ejp5Ho — The Virginian-Pilot (@virginianpilot) February 1, 2019

Despite calls from both Democrats and Republicans to resign (all amid a growing scandal that now includes allegations of sexual assault against the man who would become governor if Northam stepped down, and an admittance of wearing blackface by the man who would assume that person’s position), Northam has not yet done so.

It’s a common refrain that millennials and the generations that follow will have a much more difficult time running for political office, where voters often demand squeaky clean records. The reason? We’ve given the internet too much of our information. All it’ll take is a simple Google search or a quick dive into the Wayback Machine to find evidence of a politician’s 17-year-old self using a homophobic slur, and they’ll be done for good.

Which, sure. Social media does make it much easier for anyone to search a celebrity or politician’s Twitter history for problematic content than it would be to research old photo albums or individual interviews they’ve given over the course of their career. Consider James Gunn, the Guardians of the Galaxy director whom Disney fired over decade-old jokes on Twitter about rape and pedophilia, or Kevin Hart, whose homophobic standup bits and Twitter jokes (and refusal to apologize for them) cost him the job of 2019 Oscars host.

But records of people’s younger, more thoughtless selves existed way before Facebook and MySpace, in yearbooks. Before social media, yearbooks offered a significant and public medium in which to present oneself. In many cases, high school seniors get to pick a quote that shows up next to their picture, not unlike an Instagram caption, and some yearbooks also list the activities that each student participated in or inside jokes they shared with their friend group.

Those jokes, of course, were the subject of one of last fall’s most important political events: the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose high school yearbook entries appeared to allude to drinking and sex. The discoveries were made more significant because Kavanaugh had recently been accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford when both were teenagers, and ended up launching a national conversation about what young men are able to get away with in America when they are wealthy and white.

The Northam scandal, too, has created a ripple effect of yearbook-digging. Pages from old yearbooks at colleges like George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and others are now going viral, depicting racist slurs, blackface, and KKK uniforms. One particularly horrific instance from a late 1970s University of North Carolina yearbook shows white fraternity members in KKK robes pretending to lynch a man in blackface.

“We’re going to see more of this — these pictures are probably lurking in people’s yearbooks everywhere,” Kirt von Daacke, a history professor at the University of Virginia who has been studying yearbooks, told the Washington Post. “No one stopped to think about what’s in them — and what story does that tell.”

In the past, often the way yearbooks were used to dig up information about a suddenly important person was to provide proof of one’s background. When Ken Starr became a household name by working as independent counsel in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, the Washington Post reached for his high school yearbooks, which confirmed the many clubs and activities he took part in, his status as senior class president, and the fact that he was voted “most likely to succeed.”

There were also tabloid-y versions of the same thing: During the Scott Peterson murder trial in 2003, the National Enquirer dug through Peterson’s high school yearbook to discover that he’d accidentally written “good deads” instead of “good deeds” in a message to friends. While likely a simple spelling error and of zero consequence to the actual trial, it at least felt like enough of a gossipy coincidence to publish.

Yearbooks as an institution may be falling out of favor these days — after the 2008 recession, many colleges stopped publishing them to save money — and they’ve arguably become somewhat redundant. During my senior year of high school in 2010, for instance, the only place I really saw my classmates’ senior pictures was in Facebook albums of a dozen or so options that they’d post and have people vote on.

Recent efforts to digitize yearbooks, like the one undertaken by Classmates Online in 2010, have helped surface stories with major institutional implications. Since the Northam scandal broke, Mississippi Today and the American Ledger have investigated digitized yearbooks from Mississippi State and Ole Miss and found decades’ worth of blackface, KKK robes, and other racist acts, including one photo that may include Mississippi’s Lt. Governor Tate Reeves. To help others do the same, the website Journalist’s Resource has also offered five ways to find the yearbooks of public figures, including scouring the Internet Archive, visiting a library, reaching out to the person’s former classmates, or checking eBay.

Because even though records of older politicians’ younger selves may be more laborious to find, we’ve continued to unearth evidence of arguably far worse behavior than one might expect to uncover about a politician in their 20s or 30s. Instances of blackface, for example, now tend to make news fast, whereas if it occurred in earlier decades, it typically existed within far more private media — like yearbooks. Those of us who grew up with the internet are much more conscious of its permanence (teenagers tend to take more security measures to protect their online privacy than older millennials); meanwhile, young people in decades past likely had little awareness that misogynistic “inside jokes” or racist “costumes” would be able to be easily found a generation later and used as evidence against them.

This isn’t to say that young people don’t do horrible things on social media all the time — just last week, a white Maryland high schooler used the n-word while lashing out on Snapchat over a lost basketball game; last spring, four people in their teens and 20s were accused of live-streaming an assault of a teen with mental disabilities. For many middle and high schoolers, Instagram is primarily a place for bullying — and these are instances in which the person in question intended for their actions to end up on the internet.

People have always had ways of preserving a version of themselves, whether hateful and abhorrent or not. It just happens to be that now, there are virtually infinite ways to do so online. But before social media helped make them increasingly irrelevant (besides decades-old political scandals, we usually only tend to hear about yearbooks these days when a teenager’s funny senior quote becomes a meme), yearbooks were a far more important medium in which to perform an identity.

These days, we like to think that we know better, despite the fact that many young people still do things like post videos of themselves in blackface. Now, however, these instances travel much faster and spark an immediate backlash, which couldn’t be said for yearbooks in the 1980s. We still, however, haven’t seemed to figure out how to reckon with evidence that our political leaders committed atrocious acts, particularly when they are older white men: Kavanaugh, of course, was ultimately confirmed to the Supreme Court.

But you can’t delete a yearbook page just because it was printed before everyone realized that their actions as young adults still matter when they’re old enough to sit in a position of power. Considering how rapidly scandals have erupted all over the country thanks to uncovered yearbook photos, it’s likely there are more coming.