A few weeks ago, in an article featuring Dr. Edray Goins, The New York Times made the startling declaration that he was one of only perhaps a dozen black mathematicians among nearly 2,000 tenured faculty members in the nation’s top 50 math departments. Just think of that — 12 out of 2000.

Just 12.

I have felt for a long time that math was a specific and ongoing deficit among black children here and that their scores are either static or minimally improved, but well-hidden in the general annual reports that mark student progress.

Make no mistake. I do not mean or intend to deride any efforts that make doable enterprises, including the military, available for students who can’t or will not go to college. But the presence of only twelve or so African Americans among 2000 tenured professional faculty throughout the whole country says to me that math is off-limits to blacks as much, and perhaps more, than any Jim Crow statute could ever make possible.

But many, not just one, are to blame.

I was never any good in math and struggled with it all through school. I dreaded the sounds that signaled its start. And the last class I took was the last one I had to take. After that, it was all English and essays. My own people are partly to blame. We give so much value to performance; we love oratory; we love preaching; we love language and “the word.” And somewhere in all those demonstrated preferences, we have lost our love of numbers and their corollary — precise, insightful, measurable, and clear. I was a young adult before I began developing any real insight into numbers. Take this as an example.

When someone tells you that 1/8 of women will battle breast cancer in their lifetimes, form an image of 10 of your best women friends in a circle and call out their names. Then add two or three more, and they, all of them, are the ones who’ll get cancer.

Think of the 70 percent who don’t vote. That’s 7 out of every 10 who don’t vote; that’s 70 out of 100! No wonder we’re having such problems.

Put your own son or daughter in that 20 percent who won’t graduate high school. Put them in,  and then see who’s left. That’s what “percentage” means.

Of course, that is just elementary math.

But school systems and governments now talk “doable” jobs and “decent” incomes, or military service for those who cannot do math. That has to change.

We simply can’t bury that statistic anymore. We shouldn’t accept that reality anymore. We must insist on math and math competence, even math accomplishment.

If I had a boy child, he’d know how to count before he ever uttered a word.

And if I had a girl child, she’d be aiming right now for raising that number of black math PhDs.

I’d settle for No. 13.

Either way.

Yolande Robbins is a community correspondent for The Post. Email her at  yolanderobbins@fastmail.com