Malay race

The linguistic connections between Madagascar, Polynesia and Southeast Asia were recognized early in the colonial era by European authors, particularly the remarkable similarities between Malagasy, Malay, and Polynesian numerals.

[5][7] The connections between Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands were also noted by other European explorers, including the orientalist William Marsden and the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster.

[3] In his 1775 doctoral dissertation titled De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (trans: On the Natural Varieties of Mankind), Blumenbach outlined Johann Friedrich Blumenbach main human races by skin color, geography, and skull measurements; namely "Caucasians" (white), "Ethiopians" (black), "Americans" (red), and the "Mongolians" (yellow).

[3] The British naturalist James Cowles Prichard originally followed Blumenbach by treating Papuans and Native Australians as being descendants of the same stock as Austronesians.

[3][5][7] In 1899, the Austrian linguist and ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt coined the term "Austronesian" (German: austronesisch, from Latin auster, "south wind"; and Greek νῆσος, "island") to refer to the language family.

Raffles formed a vision of Malays as a language-based 'nation', in line with the views of the English Romantic movement at the time, and in 1809 sent a literary essay on the topic to the Asiatic Society.

After he mounted an expedition to the former Minangkabau seat of royalty in the Pagaruyung, he declared it was ‘the source of that power, the origin of that nation, so extensively scattered over the Eastern Archipelago’.

Native Indonesian were diverse and included ethnicities that have their own culture, identity, traditions and languages that are very different from coastal Malay people.

Thus, making Malay just as one of myriad Indonesian ethnicities, sharing common status with Javanese (including their sub-ethnic such as Osing and Tenggerese), Sundanese, Minangkabau, Batak tribes, Bugis, Dayak peoples, Acehnese, Balinese, Torajan, Moluccans and Papuans.

[19] In Malaysia, the early colonial censuses listed separate ethnic groups, such as "Malays, Boyanese, Achinese, Javanese, Bugis, Manilamen (Filipino) and Siamese".

This misconception is due in part to American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer, who had proposed that Filipinos were actually Malays who migrated north from what are now Indonesia and Malaysia.

[20][21] Although Beyer's theory is now completely rejected by modern anthropologists, the misconception remains and most Filipinos still conflate Malay with Austronesian identity, almost always equating the two.

Eventually, nine states (Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming) explicitly prohibited marriage between Caucasians and Filipinos.