The math goes like this: A typical African American's net worth is $17,000, while the typical white American's worth is $170,000, which is a tenfold gap. You want to close the aforementioned gap in homeownership — 40 percent vs. 70 percent. You also have to factor in the income gap (about 25 percent), the cost of education, the differences in savings and investment. To close all those gaps with payment over 30 years, it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $357,000 per African American citizen. Multiply that by the 40 million individuals whose ancestors were enslaved, and you arrive at around $14 trillion.